text: University College London (UCL) was founded in 1826. It was born in the ferment of radical London in the 1820s and 1830s and was heavily influenced by the Scottish and French Enlightenments. UCL was part of the radical opposition to the hegemony of Oxford and Cambridge. In medicine, UCL was a force in combatting the conservative and religious monopoly of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons
  Although Edinburgh University was well ahead at the time, UCL had a professor of Materia Medica and Pharmacy,  A.T.Thomson, from the start. Later this was renamed as the chair of Materia Medica and Therapeutics.  Its best known holder was Sydney Ringer (1878–87), who worked on the isolated beating heart and is renowned for his eponymous salt solution which he designed to maximise the  viability of isolated hearts. His textbook ‘Handbook of Therapeutics’ ran for 13 editions between 1869 and 1897.
  In 1905. Pharmacology was established as a distinct discipline within basic medical sciences at UCL. It was the first Department of Pharmacology in England.
  Most of the people involved in the development of quantitative analysis of drug-receptor interactions worked at some time in UCL's Departments of Pharmacology, or of Physiology or of Biophysics.